Person · Persian physician & translator · Iran
Burzōe
Also known as Burzoe, Burzuya, Burzoy, Barzawayh
Khosrow I's court physician, sent to India in the sixth century to obtain the Pañcatantra and translate it into Middle Persian. His Pahlavi version is lost, but every European descendant of the book — through Syriac, Arabic, Hebrew, Latin, Italian, German, Spanish, French and English — goes back through it.
- Date
- 500–580
- Function
- Science & medicine
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 33.090, 48.260 (approximate)
Worth knowing
His own autobiographical preface survives, embedded in the Arabic Kalila wa Dimna: an account of becoming a physician, of the limits of medicine, and of a search for a teaching that would outlast a cure. A translator's personal statement of why he took a job is preserved because the book he translated was copied for fourteen centuries.
About the place
Placed in the Sasanian heartland of western Iran, where he served Khosrow I at Ctesiphon and made the Pahlavi translation after returning from India.
Connections (3)
- TransmissionPañcatantra
Burzoe was sent to India by Khosrow I specifically to get this book and translate it, and his Pahlavi version is the sole channel through which the Panchatantra left India westward. Both the Sanskrit original and the Pahlavi translation are lost, so the earliest recoverable form of the text is the Arabic made from the Pahlavi two centuries later. The whole European tradition rests on a double loss.
- TransmissionKalīla wa Dimna
Ibn al-Muqaffa translated Burzoe's Pahlavi into Arabic at Basra about 750 and kept Burzoe's own autobiographical preface inside it, which is why a sixth-century Persian physician's account of his own doubts survives at all. He was executed for heresy in his thirties; the book he made has been copied and illustrated continuously for twelve hundred years.
- PatronageKhosrow I Anushirvan
Khosrow I Anushirvan sent his court physician Burzōe to India to collect medical and philosophical texts; Burzōe returned with the Pañcatantra, which he translated into Pahlavi as Kalīlag ud Dimnag (the ancestor of Ibn al-Muqaffa’s Kalīla wa Dimna), and with the Caraka Saṃhitā.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Burzoe”. Ibn al-Muqaffaʿs Kalīla wa Dimna, preface; François de Blois, Burzōy's Voyage to India and the Origin of the Book of Kalīlah wa Dimnah (1990).
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